Major Project - Dialogue System

In creating a dialogue system, I conceptualised something similar to Octopath Traveler’s one on one cutscenes, where a spotlight would highlight each character in their environment, as seen in the prototype below.

The first dialogue system concepts were made before a style guide was, when I was experimental with my design choices. I inspired them by the borders of 60s-70s band posters, such as David Bowie's curved corners - though had little success.

In the end, I chose the below one, due to it's simplicity while still carrying unique musical iconography.

I originally developed the dialogue system to be extremely simple, as I didn't see any scenarios where it would get heavy use. For example, I originally deliberated as to having them all contained within custom events, which was the thought process for here. Any time the player made an input, a variable would add, and a new line would appear.

In doing so, we got something like this.

However, as I made a style guide, and we imported new Ready Player Me models into the game, I wanted to revisit this interface with both points. Thus, I created a new textbox sprite - one in line with the style guide's specifications.

Next, with the style guide recomending spotlight BG's, I decided to change the interface to be darker, with the two characters illuminated by the light.

However, this ended up quite creepy - to where, I decided instead to bring in a new post-processing, one from a free Unreal pack. This gave a comic-like look to the models, and helped create a cartoony atmopshere around them that made the interface more pleasant to look at.

Next, I decided to make it an actual dialogue system - one that is created through arrays, and adds dialogue every life that you can set outside the widget, simply done by giving an array to each line, all triggered by simply clicking the screen. To do this, I created a series of arrays, and a series of custom events to allow them to work - all tied to one, which is triggered by the clicking.

For example, this checks what bubble animation needs to play, wherether it needs to be a second one over one who already has one over their head, or a new one over the second party.

This one checks what expression they need to play for that particular line, which can be done for characters on both sides - allowing a silent character to react to the talking character's dialogue.

For more dynamic scenes, there is code to allow multiple characters to be in one scene, with code changing the spotlight to remove one for the other, dependant on if the current NPC array is the same as the previous one or not.

Finally, this all comes together in a fun dialogue system, allowing for all sorts of different interactions.